Néstor García Canclini

imagined
globalization

Translated and with an Introduction by george yudice

imagined
globalization
a book in the series
l atin a merica in tr ansl ation / en tr aducción / em tr adução
Sponsored by the Duke–University of North Carolina Program in Latin American Studies
 Néstor García Canclini

imagined
globalization
Translated and with an Introduction by george yúdice

Duke University Press  Durham and London  2014

© 2014 Duke University Press
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America on acid-­free paper ∞
Designed by Courtney Leigh Baker. Typeset in Whitman by Copperline Book Services.
Originally published as La globalización imaginada, copyright for all Spanish editions
Editorial Paidós, saicf, Buenos Aires and México D.F., 1999.
Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data
García Canclini, Néstor.
[Globalización imaginada. English]
Imagined globalization / Néstor García Canclini ; translated by George Yúdice.
pages cm — (Latin America in translation / en traducción / em tradução)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn 978-­0-­8223-­5461-­1 (cloth : alk. paper)
isbn 978-­0-­8223-­5473-­4 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Globalization — Social aspects.  2. Acculturation. 
i. García Canclini, Néstor. Globalización imaginada. Translation of:  ii. Title. 
iii. Series: Latin America in translation / en traducción / em tradução.
hm841.g3713  2014
 303.48'2 — dc23
2013030267
contents

Translator’s Introduction  vii

Introduction
Culture and Politics in the Imaginaries of Globalization  xxxv

part i
narr atives, metaphors, and theories

One
Globalize or Defend Identity: How to Get Out of This Binary  3

Two
Globalization: An Unidentified Cultural Object  20

Three
Market and Interculturality: Latin America between
Europe and the United States  43

Four
We Don’t Know What to Call Others  77

part ii
interlude

Five
Disagreements between a Latin American Anthropologist,
a European Sociologist, and a U.S. Cultural Studies Scholar  101
 part iii
policies for intercultur ality

Six
From Paris to Miami via Nueva York  115

Seven
Capitals of Culture and Global Cities  137

Eight
Toward a Cultural Agenda of Globalization  151

Nine
Toward an Anthropology of Misunderstandings: A Methodological
Discussion on Interculturality  179

Epilogue
Social and Imaginary Changes in Globalization Today  201

References  217   Index  229

tr anslator’s introduction
George Yúdice

What hasn’t been written or said about globalization? In mid-­October 2011

a title keyword search in the Library of Congress online catalogue generated
5,514 entries; a search in the Worldwide Political Science abstracts produced
16,801, Proquest Sociological abstracts gave 20,492, and a Summon search at
the University of Miami Richter Library produced 271,962 entries in book, ar-
ticle, and other formats. In such a forest of resources, why single out this book?
A first answer is that if you want to know about and understand Latin Amer-
ica’s place in what Hannerz (1989) called the global ecumene,1 García Canclini
is the best starting point; no one, as far as I know, has dwelled on the im-
pact of globalization on the relations between Latin America, Europe, and the
United States or among Latin American countries in such a consistent manner.
His insights extend to regional thinking in general, that is, to the integration

1. The totality of the inhabited world characterized by “persistent cultural interaction and
exchange” (Hannerz 1989: 66).
strategies (European Union, U.S.-­led free trade agreements, particularly with
Latin America, and Mercosur or the Common Market of the South) that were
the hoped-­for remedies for the threats to regional hegemonies (Germany, the
United States, and Brazil) in a rapidly globalizing world that rearranged pro-
duction, labor, distribution, and markets. Second, he is a committed Latin
Americanist, arguing less about the various tendencies of globalization than
about charting flexible strategies to advance through this conceptual thicket
toward greater effectiveness for a region that has fallen behind. (But some
of whose countries — in particular Brazil and Argentina — have charted new
directions independent of global hegemonic institutions, as García Canclini
acknowledges in the epilogue, written twelve years after the publication of
the original Spanish-­language book in 1999.) Third, these strategies require
constructing a methodological framework “capable of organizing the diver-
gent perspectives and imaginaries of globalization” (38) in order to discern
how local and regionally networked actors, including those excluded from both
national and globalized economic, political, and communications enterprises,
can intervene symbolically and politically to open new public spheres of in-
fluence, and thereupon invent new forms of governance. Constructing such a
framework entails interdisciplinary inquiry, which is one of García Canclini’s
fortes. Fourth, García Canclini places intermediation — the ability to make
arrangements throughout the chain of local, national, regional, and global in-
stances — at the center of policymaking and sociopolitical action (177). Fifth,
and most important, all of the above require attention to interculturality and
its imaginaries: interculturality because globalization processes throw together
people with different sociocultural backgrounds, and imaginaries because they
constitute a major resource in how different people approach each other and
interact. Finally (although I could go on mentioning other reasons for reading
this book), García Canclini offers a poetics of the imaginaries of globalization
by focusing on narrative and metaphor as constitutive of the ways in which
people seek to deal with contingency, especially in a globalizing era in which
formations that once created a measure of security — in particular nation-­
states and supranational formations and their social welfare institutions (e.g.,
the European Union) — erode and in the process unleash uncertainty.

Globalization and Hybridization

This translator’s introduction can be understood as a reader’s guide, not only
to this book but to its place in García Canclini’s oeuvre. As in any other writ-
er’s work, there are themes that are returned to, not like idées fixes but like

viii  tr ansl ator’s introduction

variations of a fugue, reworked in connection with changing contexts and
circumstances. Before García Canclini began to write about globalization he
was already writing about the transformations of imaginaries, particularly
of artists, writers, and artisans, in the context of capitalist modernization.
This is evident in his award-­winning Transforming Modernity: Popular Culture
in Mexico ([1982] 1993), which deals with how artisans reconvert their tradi-
tional practices under capitalism according to a dual process of being acted
upon and simultaneously creating something new that does not repudiate the
past. García Canclini expands his scope to include art, cultural industries,
the media, consumer culture, heritage and national identity, folklore, crafts,
popular cultures, museums, urban life, and the disciplines that study them
in his other award-­winning book Hybrid Cultures: Strategies for Entering and
Leaving Modernity ([1989] 1995). In “Hybrid Cultures in Globalized Times,” the
introduction to the 2005 reprint of the book in English, originally written for
the second Spanish-­language edition in 2001 (two years after Imagined Global-
ization was first published), García Canclini (2005: xxxv) states that although
he did not use the concept of globalization in that book, the processes he exam-
ined belonged to the “culmination of modern conflicts and tendencies,” which
is how Giddens and Beck understood globalization.
It is important to point out that by hybridization García Canclini (2005:
xxxi) does not refer to mestizaje, the cultural melting pot that produced, under
nationalizing policies, a normative notion of identity, one of whose artistic
elaborations is the magical realist aesthetic that also became a product that
fanned the exoticizing desires in the countries of the North. In response to a
critique by the Peruvian intellectual Antonio Cornejo Polar, García Canclini
embraced the identification of hybridization with nondialectical heterogene-
ity, which entails not fusion or integration but speaking from many places at
once (xxx), thus buttressing the insight that identity has multiple sources and
framings and that it is ideology that fixes that multiplicity for strategic pur-
poses. The challenge to a normalizing mestizaje that García Canclini charts
in his work is contemporaneous with the rise of social and ethnic movements
that led to the recognition that Latin American societies are pluricultural and
multiethnic, which by the late 1980s and early 1990s was institutionalized in
constitutional reform throughout the region. His focus is less on the particular
mobilizations than on the processes of hybridization that can be assisted by
national and regional policies to “avoid segregation and transform into inter-
culturality . . . to work democratically with divergences so that history is not
reduced to a war among cultures, as Samuel Huntington imagines. We can
choose to live under conditions of war or hybridization” (xxxi). This view is

tr ansl ator’s introduction  ix

consistent with the multiple ways of life that people should have the freedom
to choose, as promoted by the 2004 undp Human Development Report, “Cul-
tural Liberty in Today’s Diverse World” and the Convention for the Protection
and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions, adopted by 148 coun-
tries in October 2006 and ratified in March 2007. Indeed García Canclini par-
ticipated in events at which the founding documents of the Convention were
discussed, such as the Intergovernmental Conference on Cultural Policies for
Development (Stockholm, 1998), in which development is defined not in terms
of economic growth but by the sense that quality of life depends on the free-
dom to choose how one wants to live, including one’s identity or identities.

The Trouble with Multiculturalism

Another theme that García Canclini (1998: 12) returns to frequently is his dis-
satisfaction with U.S. multiculturalism, because he understands it as a form
of segregation: to each ethnicity and race its own identity, set of institutions,
and (taken-­for-­granted) culture, on the basis of which the groups ground their
claims. For García Canclini, globalization makes an unconditional defense of
identity counterproductive; intercultural encounter and interaction, on the
other hand, may lead to new forms of agency in what seems to be an overdeter-
mined world: “I do not think that the main option today is to defend identity
or to globalize. The most illuminating studies of the globalizing process are not
those that lead us to review questions of identity in isolation but those that lead
us to understand the benefits of knowing what we can do and be in relation to
others, like dealing with heterogeneity, difference, and inequality” (13).
Imagined Globalization includes an insightful comparative reflection on the
various national and regional ways in which otherness is dealt with. To this
end, García Canclini identifies four models in the West: “the European repub-
lican system of universal rights, the multicultural separatism of the United
States, multiethnic integrations under the nation-­state in Latin American
countries, and — cutting across all of them — multicultural integration fostered
by the mass media” (xlii and chapter 4). While he finds all of these models of
intercultural relations to be quite insufficient to guarantee democratic partici-
pation in national polities and transnational contexts — “A democratic political
culture and a democratic cultural policy go beyond recognizing differences;
they must also create the conditions to live those differences in ambiguity”
(97) — he is particularly skeptical of the generally expedient forms of recog-
nizing others in U.S. multiculturalism. This skepticism is in part produced

x  tr ansl ator’s introduction

by the academic, political, and media claims made regarding Latinos, which
are to this day largely stereotypical, not only from without (e.g., assumptions
about undocumented workers extended to all Latinos) but also from within
(the attempt by Hispanic marketers to sell their “expert” knowledge of Lati-
nos to advertisers in order to cash in on the demographic boom; Dávila 2001,
2008; Yúdice 2009).
Coherentist understandings of U.S. minorities, and in particular Latinos,
are breaking down, which means that some of the assumptions that García
Canclini has had regarding multicultural separatism may have to be altered.
Whether we look at Obama’s statements on multiracial belonging or the 37 per-
cent increase in the number of people who selected more than one race on the
2010 U.S. Census or the contradictory findings regarding how Latinos identify
(40 percent as brown, mestizo, or mulatto, according to the Beyond Demo­
graphics Latino Identity Research Initiative study, or 58 percent as white, ac-
cording to a U.S. Census Bureau analysis of the 2010 data), the imaginaries are
becoming more diverse.2 This observation confirms García Canclini’s premise
of differential and/or multiple identities, but it also mitigates the claim that
U.S. Latinos add another 30 million (in 1999) to the number of Spanish speak-
ers of Spain and Latin America as part of a transnational regional imaginary
(45), for an increasing number are English-­dominant and monolingual English
speakers.3 The point of this observation is not to prove that Hispanics have this
or that identity but rather that they constitute a heterogeneous demographic
that is undergoing rapid change and that any attempt to capture their reality is
like shooting at a moving target, precisely the metaphor that García Canclini
uses for the analysis of interculturality in globalized times (25).

2. The Beyond Demographics Latino Identity Research Initiative was reported on by Cartagena
(2010). It was conducted by Starcom Mediavest Group and reflects the marketing pitch of the
client, Telemundo. Marketing is one source of information on Latinos, but as Dávila (2001, 2008)
and other observers argue, it is often not reliable. The U.S. Census Bureau’s analysis is seemingly
more accurate, but it is based on a limited number of questions. Nevertheless, given that respon-
dents were given the option to identify as Hispanic/Latino and select a racial category, it is indeed
significant that so many chose the white racial category, to the point that they “accounted for
three-­fourths of the white population growth” from 2000 to 2010 (U.S. Census Bureau 2011b).
Another telling datum is an increase in the number of Latinos who identified with two or more
races (U.S. Census Bureau 2011a).
3. Analysis of the 2010 Census data and the Pew Hispanic Center’s studies on Latino lan-
guage use reveals that the number of Spanish speakers is decreasing compared to the number of
English-­dominant Latinos because the majority of Latinos — as high as 67 percent of the sixteen-­
to-­twenty-­five age cohort — is born and raised in the United States (Pew Hispanic Center 2009).
By the third generation the vast majority of Latinos speak only English, and virtually all of their
cultural fare is in English (Yúdice 2011a).

tr ansl ator’s introduction  xi

Regional Integration
Some critics interpreted Hybrid Cultures as a celebration of hybridity, but García
Canclini makes clear in the new introduction to that book and in Imagined
Globalization that globalizing processes throw people together, produce forms
of homogenization, as in consumer products and commercial media, and “ar-
ticulate fragmentation of the world that reorders differences and inequalities
without eradicating them” (24). He is neither globophilic (a McDonaldizer)
nor globophobic (a Macondoizer) but an analyst of the contradictory tenden-
cies, seeking to detect “spaces of cultural and political intermediation” (14)
and work toward the formulation of policies that transform interculturality
into a “transnational exercise of cultural citizenship” (164). To this end, he has
a cautious utopian hope in regional integration, for two reasons: to create a
resilient foundation to resist the neocolonial economic projects of Europe and
the United States and to compensate for failed national projects.
With regard to the first reason, Latin American countries historically have
been prey to economic control by the International Monetary Fund, the World
Bank, and more recently U.S.-­led free trade agreements seeking to implement
neoliberal restructuring prescriptions: privatization, monetary devaluations,
shrinkage of public employment and critical public services like unemploy-
ment insurance, health care, and education. But recently, as García Canclini
observes in the epilogue, a number of countries have abandoned these pre-
scriptions and, at least in the past decade, have seen growth, while the United
States, Japan, and Europe have undergone steep economic crises. Lack of eco-
nomic “discipline,” in the terms dictated by the imf and the World Bank, has
not led to an economic crisis in Argentina. On the contrary, its economy has
grown at rates of 7 to 9 percent annually in recent years. Brazil and Uruguay
successfully have also sought alternative economic models, and as in Argen-
tina they have been able to reduce poverty and increase social services. The
new imaginary of economic growth and social responsibility is most associ-
ated with Brazil. Indeed in the epilogue García Canclini goes so far as to con-
sider Brazil’s rise on the international scene as a major departure from Euro-­
Americo-­centric history: “We can contrast this to a previous transformative
event, the fall of the Berlin Wall, which was interpreted as a change in world
history but in reality was a Eurocentric affair” (203).
When it comes to culture, however, not enough is known about the vibrancy
of what is taking place in Brazil, to which I return later. Latin American cul-
tural imaginaries are still largely rooted in the distributional control of trans-
national and global conglomerates, which erodes the possibilities, with few

xii  tr ansl ator’s introduction

exceptions such as telenovelas, for Latin Americans to circulate their audio-
visual and literary narratives across the region. The problem is even worse
in publishing because distribution in each country is limited to national au-
thors. Moreover García Canclini is particularly critical of the lack of interest
by transnational publishing conglomerates in disseminating the intellectual
and social scientific work of Latin Americans (125); this problem extends to the
politicians and businessmen involved in regional economic integration who
“take little interest in higher education, scientific research, and technology
because they ignore the connections between culture and modern, globalized
knowledge among Latin Americans” (62).
Regional integration should, on the contrary, create larger markets, if only
there were adequate intergovernmental policies and follow-­up procedures to
make this dream a reality. Two comments can be made about this project. The
first is that the model for integration — the European Union — at present seems
to be coming apart at the seams, economically and sociopolitically. García
Canclini quotes Ulrich Beck’s (2000) snide remark about the impending “Bra-
zilianation of Europe” (62), but after more than eight years of steady growth
and an impressive decrease in poverty, Europe would do well to emulate the
direction in which Brazil has been moving. As regards sociopolitical matters,
anti-­immigrant and anti-­intercultural sentiments have enabled xenophobic
right-­wing parties, even in countries like Holland and Sweden, to elect suffi-
cient numbers of parliamentarians to hold a balance of power. The European
crisis is generating a new set of imaginaries, including those of the indignants,
about which more below.
Regarding the second reason for seeking regional integration, the 1990s
were a period of decline under neoliberal policies throughout Latin America.
While the region was not capable of reversing the downslide, García Canclini
has been hopeful that regional integration might prepare the ground for a
turnaround. This hope is also present with respect to the development of the
culture and media industries in cities, despite their problems with segregation,
criminality, and security. He writes, “If arts and crafts traditions, museums,
and historic neighborhoods could become part of an urban (and national) de-
velopment project together with advanced communication and computer sys-
tems, they would provide other opportunities for dealing with the problems of
disintegration and inequality” (147). The correction to national decay seems
to be both infra-­ (cities) and supranational (regional integration). Insofar as
culture is concerned, it should be pointed out that two regional research and
funding projects cited by García Canclini — the U.S.-­Mexico Fund for Culture,
a public-­private initiative to encourage collaborative work between Americans

tr ansl ator’s introduction  xiii

and Mexicans, and the Andrés Bello Covenant, a unesco-­like Latin American
treaty to promote the development of education, science, and culture, initially
in the Andean countries — have shuttered, a testament to the difficulties of
maintaining regional collaboration. Moreover the crisis of Spanish financial
and infrastructural promotion for the development of Ibero-­American cultural
and media initiatives in the region — seemingly in tandem with Spanish in-
roads into a number of Latin American industries: banking, insurance, tele-
communications, hospitality and tourism, publishing, and audiovisual media,
a move that García Canclini criticizes (131 and especially García Canclini
2002) — is likely to have a negative impact on the development of progressive
cultural policies.4 Nevertheless there is momentum as the economies of several
Latin American countries (Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Panama, Peru)
have fared well during the current global economic crisis, some bolstering
their progressive cultural policies (Argentina, Brazil, and Colombia) and oth-
ers instituting or upgrading ministries of culture (Panama, Peru). And there
are initiatives in place, especially Brazil’s innovative bottom-­up cultural poli-
cies under Ministers of Culture Gilberto Gil and Juca Ferreira, that give some
cause for hope.5 The bottom-­up policies implemented in Brazil have aided an
already vibrant civic and independent cultural scene that bears out García
Canclini’s observation in the epilogue that citizens disaffected with abstrac-
tions like those of the European Union or with failed political top-­down proj-
ects like those of most political parties, are interested in new arrangements
contrary to neoliberal prescriptions. However, insofar as culture commands

4. Two examples of beneficial influence on Latin American cultural policies and initiatives are
the creation of a new cultural ministry in Peru, oriented toward cultural development and not
simply the support of elite arts or national heritage (Losson in press), and the creation of the
Central American Culture and Integration Project to “strategically promote the insertion of
civil society cultural networks into the institutional process of Central American integration in
concert with international cultural cooperation” (Cultura e Integración n.d.; Yúdice 2011b). Both
have been supported by the Spanish Agency for International Cooperation and Development.
5. President Dilma Rousseff’s replacement of Ana de Hollanda in September 2012 with Marta
Suplicy, a veteran Workers Party politician and former mayor of São Paulo, was a welcome relief
for progressives in Brazil. Hollanda was perceived to be a supporter, in the cultural sphere, for
Rousseff’s aggressive and hardly democratic developmentalist policies (e.g., the environmentally
destructive and ethnically detrimental Belo Monte hydroelectric dam project, recently halted
by a Brazilian federal court). After eight years of the most progressive digital culture initiatives
under Gil and Ferreira, Hollanda fought down copyright reform initiatives, including those
of many local cultural and civil society organizations and enterprises that claimed that U.S.-­
endorsed digital protection policies were deleterious to the circulation of the vast majority of
Brazilian cultural expressions. Rousseff’s decision to replace Hollanda was certainly welcome for
progressives, but what has also become visible is a political scramble, even by civil society organi-
zations, to cash in on the lucrative cultural policy “market” in Brazil.

xiv  tr ansl ator’s introduction

increasing influence, it is falling prey to traditional political horse-­trading,
which extends to Brazil’s halting entry into international cultural policymak-
ing, as we will see below.

The Imaginary and Interdisciplinary Methodology

García Canclini is not the first author to develop the notion of imaginaries of
the global era. Arjun Appadurai, for example, posited the notion of “imagined
worlds,” an adaptation of Benedict Anderson’s (1983: 15–16) proposal to treat
nations as “imagined communities,” experiences of belonging, of “deep, hor-
izontal comradeship” among fellow members that never meet each other. An
imagined community is a “structure of feeling,” “a kind of feeling and think-
ing,” a constellation of “meanings and values as they are actively lived and felt,
[whose] relations [with] formal or systematic beliefs are in practice variable.” A
structure of feeling, in sum, is a “cultural hypothesis” (Williams 1977: 128–35).
Appadurai (1996: 33) expands the concept to capture the “multiple worlds that
are constituted by the historically situated imaginations of persons and groups
spread around the globe.”
Appadurai emphasizes the disjunctive and deterritorializing character of
global flows; García Canclini, in contrast, criticizes this overemphasis on no-
madism and argues that the subjects of these imagined worlds are not nomad-
ically constructed and reconstructed in a free or unconstrained manner but
are drawn into given frameworks by variable yet overdetermined forces. On
the one hand, finance institutions, transnational corporations, global media
and telecommunications conglomerates, and trade agreements have important
effects on culture and generate the imaginaries of a better world for every-
one, although they curtail possibilities of well-­being, especially for those who
are excluded from consumption because of lack of resources. On the other
hand, various kinds of migrants and the excluded also generate imaginaries
that open windows onto the “fractures and segregations of globalization”
(xxxviii) as well as knowledge of the contexts through which they move. García
Canclini offers a compelling portrayal of the differences in imaginary of the
older migrations to the Americas and the contrasting imaginaries of those
who live in transnational circuits today (chapter 3). And even among today’s
migrants, there are significant differences in the ways they imagine global-
ization: “For a Mexican or Colombian family with various members working
in the United States, globalization alludes to the narrow connections to what
occurs in that part of the country where their family members live, which dif-
fers from what Mexican or Colombian artists, such as Salma Hayek or Carlos

tr ansl ator’s introduction  xv

Vives, imagine as they encounter an audience spread throughout the U.S. mar-
ket” (xxxix). In the epilogue García Canclini refers to new imaginaries that
accompany the change from south-­to-­north migrations to north-­to-­south and
south-­south flows: Latin Americans are returning to their countries of origin,
some Europeans (e.g., the Portuguese) are seeking work in Brazil as opportuni-
ties abound there, and Haitians, for example, are finding new hopes of making
a living in Brazil (Romero 2012).
García Canclini is particularly eloquent in his development of an interdisci-
plinary methodology that integrates metaphor and narrative, a result in part
of his own training as a philosopher and anthropologist as well as his socio-
economically grounded analyses of art, literature, crafts, media, and other
forms of expression. If one had to situate him with respect to other theorists of
globalization, he would fall into the third or postskeptical or transformational
wave, conveniently distinguished from the globalist and the skeptical waves in
Martell (2007).6 Like other third-­wavers, he acknowledges global transforma-
tions and recognizes the differentiation and stratification they have wrought;
as a policy thinker, he believes nation-­states continue to be important, but he
imagines them reconstructed in sovereignty-­sharing arrangements that en-
hance citizenship as economic and political borders are traversed; his view of
the desirable society is definitely cosmopolitan democracy; and culturally he is
a major theorist of hybridization and complexity. With regard to the future, he
detects imaginaries that engage uncertainty, but his work is aimed at thinking
through strategies for dealing with contingency that produce new forms of
citizenship oriented to multiple forms of social organization rather than to
their homogenization or exclusion.
Methodologically García Canclini seeks explanatory power, and that is pre-
cisely why globalization cannot be posited as a “clearly delimited object of
study” (he wittily characterizes it as an unidentified cultural object, which

6. For globalists, globalization is causal; they favor free trade and economic integration; they
emphasize global governance or neoliberalism and the increasing irrelevance of the nation-­state;
culturally they celebrate the homogenized diversity of global brands. For the skeptics, global-
ization is discursive and multiply determined; the nation-­state and regional blocs continue to
be important, evidenced in protectionist policies that foster or attempt to undo inequality; they
favor social democracy and international regulation; culturally globalization is characterized
by clash and conflict, which will increase in the future. For the third-­way transformationalists,
globalization has indeed wrought major changes, but these have not resulted in the global village
celebrated by globalists; instead there is greater differentiation and embeddedness; rather than
a global or national sovereign, there is shared sovereignty; politically transformationalists prefer
cosmopolitan democracy; the future is uncertain, neither right nor left nor oscillating between
those poles; and culturally globalization generates hybridity (Martell 2007).

xvi  tr ansl ator’s introduction

may be imagined, even seen and experienced, but not easily explained so-
cioscientifically), nor does it correspond to “a scientific, economic, political
or cultural paradigm that can be postulated as a singular model of develop-
ment”;7 instead it is “a collection of narratives, obtained through partial approx-
imations, and diverging on many points” (23). He emphasizes the imaginary
dimension precisely because even globalist first-­wavers and skeptical second-­
wavers as well as common folk guide their actions according to utopian or
dystopian eventualities that defy the conceptual clarity that social science pur-
sues. He is interested not only in theories but in what people say, what they do,
and how they know the world. “The hypothesis is that the statistics released
by migration censuses and those agencies that track planetary circulation of
investment and consumption make more sense when they are fleshed out with
narratives of heterogeneity. Then subjects reappear within structures” (18).
And to include people in the analysis entails paying attention to the role they
play in reorienting how they navigate globalization so that it is not under-
stood as an “anonymous game of market forces ruled solely by the demand for
greater profits in supranational competition” (41).
García Canclini’s extensive ethnographic work in a number of collaborative
research projects is synthesized in books like Consumers and Citizens: Global-
ization and Multicultural Conflicts ([1995] 2001) and Imagined Globalization. It is
from that ethnographic work, which includes his analysis of artworks (indeed,
he is one of very few ethnographically oriented art critic-­theorists), as well
as in his philosophical reflections, inspired by Ricoeur (his PhD dissertation
director) and to a lesser extent Merleau-­Ponty, Rancière, and Derrida, that he
draws his responsiveness to narratives and metaphors as heuristic resources.
Narratives and metaphors help us imagine “outside of our cognitive frame-
work” (28). “We concern ourselves with the narratives and metaphors being
constructed to incorporate what generally remains within the cracks and in-
sufficiencies in theories or policies” (xli), in “the inaccuracies of statistics and
prognoses” (25). Given the complexity and ambiguities of globalization, nar-
ratives and metaphors are particularly apt for capturing messiness and flux:
“Metaphors tend to figure, to make visible that which moves, combines, or
mixes. Narratives seek to trace an order amid the profusion of travels and
communications, in the diversity of ‘others’ ” (35). This method enables García
Canclini to transcend both the arrogant triumphalism of neoliberals who

7. García Canclini uses the term scientific in reference to social science and not natural science.
The Spanish ciencia, like the German Wissenschaft, has a wider meaning than science in English
and includes the social sciences and sometimes even the humanities.

tr ansl ator’s introduction  xvii

promote “monolithic thinking” and the postmodern renunciation of univer-
sal knowledge by including the metaphors and narratives of a wide array of
subjects in the “interculturally shared rationality that organizes statements
coherently” (24).
In the methodological chapter (9) on the anthropology of intercultural
misunderstandings, García Canclini examines a few behavioral or discursive
genres (emblematic national sentences that exert performative force and the
“bureaucratic window interaction” developed by Amalia Signorelli) that en-
able insights into the “thresholds between different subjects and asymmetrical
powers, such as geographic boundaries, . . . places where one negotiates var-
ious ways of articulating public and private, collective and individual” (198).
I am reminded of Vološinov’s little behavioral genres through which individu-
als negotiate in social situations.8 These genres help maintain social stability,
but under conditions of flux, and particularly in intercultural situations, they
generate information on aspects of misunderstanding that are not easily dis-
cernible. This does not mean that adjusting these genres will eliminate the
problems raised by the “asymmetrical powers” inhering in interaction. But it
is important to recognize these forms of communication in order to facilitate
García Canclini’s goal to produce transnational public spheres that “guarantee
rights with relative independence of the actors and their subjectivities: the
same public space, with common rules for those who are cordial and hierarchi-
cal, for those who get angry, and for those who ritualize their confrontations”
(198).
Unlike most theorists of globalization, García Canclini looks to art and lit-
erature as opportunities for heuristic investigation of embodied imaginings
that are usually unavailable to thought. The public space that he seeks and
the intercultural social arrangements that ensue therefrom need to incorpo-
rate what the world of felt embodiment reveals; García Canclini thinks this
is possible through artistically elaborated metaphors. An eloquent example
is Yukinori Yanagi’s The World Flag Ant Farm installation, in which ants are
released into a set of interconnected Plexiglas boxes containing colored sand in
the form of national flags, resulting in the decomposition of the flags, mixing

8. “Each situation, fixed and sustained by social custom, commands a particular kind of orga-
nization of audience and, hence, a particular repertoire of little behavioral genres. The behavioral
genre fits everywhere into the channel of social intercourse assigned to it and functions as an
ideological reflection of its type, structure, goal, and social composition. The behavioral genre is
a fact of the social milieu: of holiday, leisure time, and of social contact in the parlor, the work-
shop, etc. It meshes with that milieu and is delimited and defined by it in all its internal aspects”
(Vološinov 1973: 96–97).

xviii  tr ansl ator’s introduction

the colors throughout the entire set, and suggesting a transnational reordering
of identities. García Canclini glosses, “The metaphor suggests that massive mi-
grations and globalization may convert today’s world into a system of flows and
interactivity in which the differences between nations dissolve” (30). Likewise
Ramírez Erre’s two-­headed Trojan horse installation looking north and south
at both countries at the border checkpoint between Tijuana and San Diego
suggests that “intercultural misunderstandings” occur in both directions in
border areas (33).

Poetics
In his most recent single-­author book, La sociedad sin relato: Antropología y
estética de la inminencia (Society without a Narrative: Anthropology and the
Aesthetics of Imminence; 2010), García Canclini expands this heuristic ap-
proach to contemporary art because, he tells us, art is no longer only in mu-
seums and galleries but has migrated to other areas (media, fashion, social
action, investment funds, urban revitalization, new technologies, security,
recovery programs for at-­risk youth, etc.). Globalization is accompanied by
this relative exit from the autonomous fields posited by Bourdieu, and art can
be examined for the semiotic traces of that transit, the different contexts in
which it operates, its reception by viewers and participants. “By upsetting the
usual relations between public and private, between cultural experimentation
and economic performance, the slow economy of artistic production fulfills
the public function of encouraging us to rethink what the impetuous economy
of the symbolic industries imposes as public, fleeting, and forgetful” (173).
Much can be learned by “being near the works and achieving the agility to
follow [their] meanderings” (2010: 243). The subtitle of the book highlights
the imminence or unfinished character of social life. In heuristic terms, it
could be said that the book is a far-­reaching exploration of what Peirce (1903)
called abduction, “the process of forming an explanatory hypothesis . . . the
only logical operation that introduces a new idea.” This heuristic is also at work
in Imagined Globalization, where García Canclini posits that it is “necessary to
maintain the surprise and allow for multiple narrations . . . [and] ask whether
or not these different narratives are compatible and hope for thick descriptions
that articulate the more or less objective structures with the more or less sub-
jective levels of meaning” (18–19).
García Canclini is exceptional in that he proposes a poetics of globalization.
It ensues in part from the abductive method that seeks the knowledge that en-
sues from surprise, from astonishment, as he calls it in Imagined Globalization.

tr ansl ator’s introduction  xix

But he also tells us that astonishment is in short supply: “We no longer are in
awe of intercultural crossings and mixtures. Nor is there room in this tran-
sition from one century to another for the unexpected when revolutionary
hopes fade and it is assumed that there is only one way to imagine globaliza-
tion” (155). In this regard, most research — in social science, anthropology, and
cultural studies — comes up short. This is a lack his book is meant to correct.
García Canclini finds sources of astonishment in the 1994 neo-­Zapatista up-
rising (18), in his encounter with a Mexican waiter in an Italian restaurant in
Scotland (“Doing Fieldwork on Mexico in Edinburgh”; 36); in his own puz-
zlement at the tragicomedy of errors of being an Argentine in Mexico and
the tensions between his philosophical and anthropological attempts to un-
derstand the circumstances that generated that consternation. Understanding
these moments requires going beyond the interpretive modalities of globalists
(epic) and skeptics (melodrama) and occupying that middle ground between
the processes — globalization and interculturality — that generate these modal-
ities. The first, he tells us, consider that globalization will override the resis-
tances of “intercultural dramas,” and the second consider that it will overlook
the differences in cultures.
Just as globalization cannot be understood without reference to intercul-
turality, the epic accounts of globalization put forth in economics, sociology,
and communications are partial without the melodramatic narratives that
anthropologists, psychoanalysts, and literary and art critics construct from
the “fissures, violence, and pain of interculturality” (17). The epic accounts
tend to be resistant to the melodramatic resistances to globalization, and “they
are quick to inform that they will be eliminated by the march of history and
generations” (17). The melodramatic accounts point to the partial character or
failure of globalizing processes. What García Canclini offers is an analysis of
globalization in which not only do the epic and the melodramatic intersect,
but multiple narrations make it possible to maintain the astonishment that is
otherwise dissolved. This is an analysis mindful of structures and hegemonies
yet attuned to the agency of subjects that traverse and attempt to remake those
structures and hegemonies.
Although he does not establish a direct connection with classical poetics, it
could be said that García Canclini is interested in the ways subjects negotiate
a radically contingent world, one in which centrifugal forces seem to over-
power those of structure and hegemony, whether the older ones of national
sovereignty or the newer ones of transnational corporations, trade agreements,
and regional integration. From ancient rituals (including Dionysian rites and

xx  tr ansl ator’s introduction

Greek tragedy) to the political, literary, artistic, and everyday actions that he
explores, imaginaries confront contingency: the arbitrariness of gods, auto-
crats, and now the global disorder wrought by deregulation, financial spec-
ulation, and global trade (whether legal or illegal). It is telling therefore that
García Canclini ignores religion, the most conventional generator of imaginar-
ies that deal with contingency. In this regard, he is somewhat of a modernist,
for whom art takes the place of religion. But as explained earlier, the narrative
mode that he seeks is neither epic nor melodrama but the various permu-
tations in which they intersect or dissolve to make way for other narrative
possibilities.
Imagined Globalization offers a poetics of interculturality because it acknowl-
edges that underlying the narratives of heterogeneity there is a global disorder,
a fundamental power-­driven arbitrariness that can be purged or purified only
through imaginaries, whether artistic or social scientific or inhering in ev-
eryday popular culture. In his Poetics, Aristotle examined tragedy as a genre
that purified the audience of pity and fear through catharsis in beholding the
disastrous consequences that fall upon the hero who misses the mark (hamar-
tia). It could be argued that the hero will always miss the mark because of the
arbitrariness of the gods. As an artistic and experimental representation of
the political space, tragedy maintains a tension between necessary authority
and fiction (human invention), heteronomy (obligation to another), and auton-
omy (internalization of the other’s discourse through the illusion of authoring
and free choice), ethics, and politics, and intertwines the legal, mythical, and
religious spheres. Mutatis mutandi, García Canclini examines how subjects
confront contingency through narrative and metaphor.

Social Science Fiction

It follows from García Canclini’s poetics that he should try his hand at narra-
tive in this book. The most obvious fictional narrative is the roman à clef of a
Latin American anthropologist, a Spanish sociologist, and a U.S. cultural stud-
ies scholar who try to make sense of intercultural relations in a changing world
(chapter 5). I am tempted to guess at the people behind these characters — I
certainly recognize their professional biases — but suffice it to say that García
Canclini himself is the model for the anthropologist. What this chapter does is
show us that theory (“science”) is not something abstract but actually inheres
in scholars’ own lives, the places they come from and how they are situated in
“delocalized information flows, in networks and travel that go beyond one’s

tr ansl ator’s introduction  xxi

own country” (101). The characters are thus set in professional conferences
or in their mediated discussions about joint research projects and what the
narrator calls “transatlantic and inter-­American circuits” (103).
The object of their discussion is in great part the counterpoint of their per-
spectives on a number of themes, which are the same ones that García Canclini
discusses more “scientifically” in other parts of the book: the significance of
European capitals (Paris, Berlin) or U.S. universities for Latin Americans and
research on Latin America; what topics and what societies on which to con-
duct research will be significant for landing a job in Europe; mestizaje and
Latin American identities versus French rationalism and U.S. multicultural-
ism and in particular the bizarre “magical realism” of U.S. racial categories;
migration and transnational approaches to what were previously thought to
be neatly bounded societies; the challenge of other cities (Venice, Madrid, São
Paulo, Kassel) to New York as important nodes of diffusion of art; the “para-­
­doxical combinations of economic globalization and cultural nationalism” (e.g.,
Spaniards who buy exclusively Spanish art), which raises issues that economists
do not deal with (107); the staggered and contradictory theoretical perspectives
(the characters discuss postcolonialism and Fanonism) that drive interpreta-
tion, and the relevance (or lack thereof) of their applicability to Latin Amer-
ica nearly two centuries after Latin American independence; the culturalist
and interpretationist bias of cultural studies and its disinterest in statistics and
“hard data” (xxxviii); and the recognition that despite these scholars’ prove-
nance, there is no such thing as “the U.S. cultural studies scholar” or “the Latin
American anthropologist” (110). The chapter ends with a plan to coauthor an
intercultural novel in which “a secondary character, half hidden in the narra-
tive, caught unexpectedly in a corner, gathers phrases from Latinos and Anglos
and speaks them as if they were his own, as if he lived elsewhere and this was
his way of being here” (111).
Another semifictional or autoethnographic passage is (the narrator-­
character) García Canclini’s encounter with a Mexican waiter in an Italian
restaurant in Edinburgh. Through their conversation, García Canclini exam-
ines the contradictions and contingencies of identity or identities, both the
waiter’s and his own. The waiter is the epitome of cosmopolitanism, but he
chooses Edinburgh to live in because it is not cosmopolitan; García Canclini
is an Argenmexican fascinated by Mexican traditions but draws the line at
spicy food. The passage concludes with the flair of the author who coined
hybrid cultures: “Belonging to a fusion identity, of the displaced, helped this
philosopher-­turned-­anthropologist to represent Mexican identity to a Mexican

xxii  tr ansl ator’s introduction

married to a Scottish woman, who represented Italianness in a restaurant in
Edinburgh” (41).
The original Imagined Globalization ends with an appendix (now chapter 9)
in which García Canclini explores the “anthropology of misunderstandings,”
subtitled “A Methodological Discussion on Interculturality.” After a discussion
of Mexican-­Argentine relations (“Can a foreigner capture what Mexico is?”;
181), brought on by García Canclini’s own experience of exile, we encounter
another interesting social science fiction. García Canclini invokes Roberto
Da Matta’s and Guillermo O’Donnell’s analyses of particular urban societies
on the basis of “what sentence is most distinctive of a society” (192). The sen-
tences are hilarious: when confronted with someone who wields (or attempts
to wield) authority over another person, the Carioca’s typical response is “Do
you know who you’re talking to?,” suggesting that perhaps the speaker is im-
portant or is related to someone important. In Buenos Aires the response is
likely to be “Who gives a shit?” García Canclini then imagines what the sen-
tence might be in Mexico and comes up with “He who gets angry loses” (193),
a sentence that is particularly relevant to his experience in Mexico as an Ar-
gentine. This is evident in another autoethnographic passage in which he tells
of his frustrating failure to get his bank account balance: when he complained,
he was told by the clerk to stop screaming at her. He realized that it was the
Argentine manner of speaking that produced the clerk’s retort. The episode
exemplifies a series of misunderstandings at the heart of intercultural com-
munication. What we see is that the protocols of communication in the small
behavioral genres referred to before are often inscrutable to someone from a
different society, or from a different class or even area of the city. Inscrutable
even to (especially to?) the anthropologist. And it is that inscrutability that
becomes grist for analysis and hopefully negotiation across the divide (or the
clerk’s window).

Intermediation
Globalization multiplies the misunderstandings, and that is why art is inter-
esting to García Canclini, for rather than apply protocols, it brackets them,
savors their strangeness, and holds open the tangential and the deviant. It
“reinstate[s] the social drama, the tension between languages, between ways
of living and thinking, that the media want to reduce to a spectacle, a quick
show so they can go on to the next one” (174). “In a world narrated like cir-
cular globalization, which simulates that it contains everything . . . art holds

tr ansl ator’s introduction  xxiii

open the possibility of choice, something much more strategic than handling
the tv’s remote control. Interrupting and choosing another logic sustains the
unstable tension between the social and modes of reimagining it, between
what exists and how we may criticize it. It refuses that globalization and its
massifying potential will look like the end of history” (174).
Interruption by artistic means has its correlate for García Canclini in
broader cultural and social movements, such as indigenous, feminist, envi-
ronmental, and other movements, which have both hegemonic and antihege-
monic aspects. But he advocates going beyond this poetics and the possibilities
of interruption to a politics of intermediation. This politics of intermediation
reproduces neither the hegemonic control by governments, large business en-
terprises, or large ngos, nor the Deleuzean option for a nomadism that eludes
control, not to speak of the naïveté of Internet enthusiasts who believe that
the distributed networks of the web have eliminated intermediaries simply
because people get to upload their own contents, or that the conceptual har-
nessing of these networks ushers in the rather vague and wistful “communism
to-­come” of Antonio Negri (2003: 144).
A strategy for remaining relevant in the era of globalization means develop-
ing the capacity to mediate what culture people consume. The culture indus-
tries of the United States, Europe, and large countries like Mexico and Brazil
have developed the international mechanisms — free trade policies, “covert”
support for certain industries (e.g., Hollywood productions), strong copyright
laws that favor large corporations, intergovernmental bodies (World Trade
Organization, World Intellectual Property Organization, etc.) that generally
take the side of the economically stronger countries — to establish profitable
markets worldwide. The problem is not that these contents are available world-
wide but that in many Latin American countries they saturate mediated public
spheres. Intermediation in the distribution and circulation of cultural contents
is important because people generally engage in conversations and debates
about what they hear and view in public spheres. If most of the cultural fare
to which people have access has little to do with their society, then there is an
impoverishment of discussion about that society. Moreover if what people have
access to from other societies is determined by large media conglomerates,
then what they get to hear and see is a very skewed and narrow selection of
the full spectrum of cultural offerings from around the world.
This view entails formulating policies that will change the intermediaries
(there is no such thing as a society without intermediaries except in the nar-
ratives provided by the frictionless planes of art and philosophy, although art
and philosophy as disciplines are themselves heavily intermediated) and make

xxiv  tr ansl ator’s introduction

them more responsible to citizens, migrants, and residents. But who will de-
sign and carry out these policies? In Imagined Globalization García Canclini
still considers that regional integration can provide the framework for such
policies. But the people who would carry them out would still be politicians,
or bankers or high-­level officers of ngos. These are precisely the people who
are no longer trusted.

Conclusion
By way of conclusion, I would like to focus on two kinds of movements that
have been transforming intermediation and innovating in the circulation of
cultural expressions in the context of globalization. These either have not ap-
peared or done so only quite recently in García Canclini’s work. The first has to
do with what the Brazilian anthropologist Hermano Vianna calls “parallel cul-
ture,” that is, production, circulation, and consumption that take place outside
formal enterprises. Most people involved in parallel culture are low-­income
and from the popular classes, most often ethnically marked; however, their
cultural practices are quite different from the cultura popular, especially arti-
sans, that García Canclini studied in his best-known books. The second has to
do with the practices of youth networks that seek to establish independent cul-
tural circuits. These youth are largely middle class. Both kinds of movements
are affirmative innovations with respect to globalization and not simply reac-
tions against it; for both as well, the status quo is a hindrance or ineffective.

par allel culture

The most spectacular expression of the first kind of movement is Nollywood,
the Nigerian film industry, which produces about three times as many films
as Hollywood and twice as many as Bollywood and employs, albeit at very
low incomes, 500,000 people. Yet this industry developed without investment
from formal companies or venture capital firms, as is the case in Hollywood,
without a huge corporative infrastructure, and without recourse to copyright
(Ogunyemi 2009).
This industry has prospered, and there are government initiatives to invest
in it and even create a film village in Abuja. Moreover the World Bank included
Nollywood in its Growth and Employment in States (gems) project, providing
U.S.$20 million to upgrade the industry. This is certainly much more than any
government or intergovernmental multilateral development bank has done for
the parallel culture industries in Latin America, with the exception of the
Points of Culture program in Brazil (described in the next section), with the

tr ansl ator’s introduction  xxv

major difference that it seeks to promote not entire industries but rather the
local expressions of thousands of communities throughout the country.
In Latin America there are vibrant parallel culture industries such as cham-
peta in Cartagena de Indias, Colombia; tecnobrega in Belém do Para, Brazil;
funk carioca in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; cumbia villera in Buenos Aires, Argen-
tina, and Montevideo, Uruguay; and the Andean video industry related in part
to huayno pop and other vernacular musics in Lima, Peru.9 They all have in
common that local entrepreneurs work with local musicians and video mak-
ers, distribute in informal markets, often associated with so-­called piracy,
and produce live shows where most money is generated, thus fulfilling the
desires of vast low-­income audiences for cultural fare that is not available in
the mainstream media. There has been an explosion in the parallel cultural
forms since portable technologies were introduced, beginning with the audio
cassette in Latin America in the 1980s, and then the cd when prices dropped
in the late 1980s and piracy took off, and very recently social media platforms
like Facebook. Additionally the electronic drum machine and synthesizer are
used in music and digital camcorders in Andean videos, as in Nollywood. In
some cases, the demand for these cultural forms is so great that they are ad-
opted by mainstream media, as in the case of the Peruvian singer Dina Páucar,
the “beautiful goddess of love,” on the basis of whose pubic persona La lucha
por un sueño (The struggle to make a dream come true), a very successful tv
miniseries, was produced in 2004 (Alfaro 2009). The important point is that

9. Champeta is an electronic urban dance music that blends Caribbean (rap-­raggareggae,

zouk, soca, and calypso) and African (soukous, highlife, mbquanga, juju) rhythms with Afro-­
Colombian-­indigenous hybrid sounds (bullerengue, mapalé, zambapalo, and chalupa) and is
played by djs in elaborate sound systems. Tecnobrega combines Afro-­Brazilian rhythms from
the state of Pará, such as carimbó and lundu, with popular genres like Caribbean calypso, on
electronic drum machines. Tecnobrega is an electronic form of brega music (brega means cheesy).
Funk carioca is the name of a music and dance style developed in Rio de Janeiro from the 1970s
on. djs associated with the black and soul cultural movement sought out U.S. black music for
their dances, particularly Miami Bass and Freestyle. Over the years the music was Brazilianized
in Rio’s favelas and there emerged a robust funk carioca music industry with djs and sound sys-
tems at the helm. Cumbia villera, the most popular music in Buenos Aires’s and Montevideo’s
shantytowns (villas), is a derivative of modern urban Colombian cumbia, a mixture of African,
indigenous, and, to a lesser degree, Hispanic influences. In addition to traditional acoustic instru-
ments, cumbia villera uses drum machines and electronic or sampled percussion. Huayno pop
is a hybrid of traditional huayno music with other genres such as cumbia, rock, pop, and techno.
While the origin of huayno in the Peruvian highlands dates back to the time of the Incan Empire,
in the twentieth century, as migrants from the highlands populated coastal Peru and particularly
Lima, the flourishing music and video industry of huayno pop developed in the popular classes of
Lima (Alfaro 2009; Yúdice 2012).

xxvi  tr ansl ator’s introduction

local actors from within these industries emerged as intermediaries and with
very few exceptions have been appropriated by formal or large enterprises.10

youth cultur al networks

In the epilogue to this book, García Canclini sees significant differences in
the youth of today and those of former countercultural movements such as
the soixante-­huitards of France, the United States, Mexico, and other countries.
His current research on youth (about which he says little in the epilogue) finds
that they “follow a logic different from that of other movements that oppose
dictatorships, promote social democracy and the socialization of commodities,
and question gender hierarchies” (208). He gives the example of the Chilean
students who are demanding changes that in the past would have been consid-
ered revolutionary: the nationalization of foreign mining enterprises, reform
of the tax code so that the rich pay more taxes, and reduction of the defense
budget. But these measures “are proposed by youth who do not identify as
revolutionary but on the contrary grew up under neoliberalism and a social
democratic system that never dared to make changes to correct the system
imposed by Pinochet” (208). These youth are imagining another way to live in
a globalized world. García Canclini also observes that “there already are places
where independent banks are being established outside the finance system,
that give loans and credit. New collective forms are appearing, many ways of
realizing themselves outside the regime of financial speculation. They are still
weak, but they show that it is not impossible, and they achieve a measure of
sustainability” (213).
As general editor of a fascinating new book on youth cultures in the digi-
tal era, García Canclini oversaw research on youth enterprises in publishing,
music production, and art spaces and galleries in Mexico (under the coordina-
tion of Maritza Urteaga Castro Pozo) and Madrid (under the coordination of
Francisco Cruces; García Canclini et al. 2012). The changes and innovations
wrought by these youth in the production, circulation, and outreach of these
enterprises, often brought into transversal synergies and managed in physical
and virtual distributed networks, led him and his colleagues to question the
usefulness of Bourdieu’s framework for studying the cultural sphere accord-
ing to separate fields. If, in modernity, we became accustomed to having long
careers as artists, producers, technicians, marketers, managers, and so forth,
in the current globalized and technified conjuncture — which some have char-
acterized as immaterial or cognitive or affective capitalism — young people

10. For more information on these phenomena, see Yúdice 2012, 2013a.

tr ansl ator’s introduction  xxvii

interested in pursuing careers find themselves shuttling among previously
defined job descriptions, and in conditions of precarity, without the hope of a
job that will provide stability and benefits. On this view, García Canclini and
colleagues add their voices to the loud critical chorus of creative industries
discourse, arguing that it doesn’t hold up to the statistics on cultural labor.
This does not mean, however, that the openness, flexibility, and innovation
seen in these youths’ modus operandi stems from the dire employment con-
ditions. They enter the cultural sphere because of a passion for music or art
or literature or new technologies, and they do so inventing entrepreneurial
modes — taking whatever opportunities are available in public and private
and nonprofit sectors, without necessarily having an ideological investment
in these sectors.
While the intermingling of the arts and the value chain functions —
 production, circulation, communication, reception — have become the norm
throughout the world, García Canclini holds firm to the artistic sphere. Yet
there has been a globalization of the subsumption of art into culture through-
out the world, a much more radical transformation than what is discernible in
the new trendsetting youth entrepreneurs about which he and his colleagues
write. Perhaps the relative neglect of cultural activism, which may combine
the arts with community rights activism, is due to García Canclini’s long-­held
belief in the power of art, defined as the interruption or bracketing of accepted
narratives. Cultural activism, in contrast, promotes rather than interrupts a
diversity of local practices. Another reason for the relative neglect of this mo-
dality in García Canclini’s work may have to do with a lack of work on Bra-
zil, particularly its innovations in cultural activism, which is not the same as
cultura popular, the culture of that metaphysical entity, the people, which he
himself revolutionized in Hybrid Cultures and Consumers and Citizens.
As mentioned earlier, the goal of Brazil’s Points of Culture program has been
to facilitate the local expressions of thousands of communities throughout the
country, or as Gilberto Gil said, to give a boost to the myriad “living cultural”
initiatives already evident in the vast diversity of communities that compose
the country: inner cities, indigenous peoples, Afro-­descendants, rural peoples,
activist digital culture movements, and so on. Gil compared this promotion of
the living culture of the communities to the release experienced in do-­in Chi-
nese massage, in which energy stopped up by physical and emotional disorders
is liberated. State action applied to the pressure points of culture is like that
massage (Ecologia Digital 2004). The notion of culture deployed in this pro-
gram is very wide-­ranging and has more to do with local creativity than with
a single or even a plural definition of culture. Creativity may apply to political

xxviii  tr ansl ator’s introduction

cooperation, innovative solidarity economic initiatives, communication net-
works, and new technologies as well as traditional knowledge and practices
and artistic expression.
Brazil is not the only country in which this cultural activism is being legis-
lated into policy. The Points of Culture program is being adopted throughout
Latin America, in Peru, Uruguay, and Costa Rica. In Argentina a network
called Cultura Viva Comunitaria (Living Community Culture) consists of not
only community organizations but a very heterogeneous set of people and
associations interested in social transformation in democratic, responsible,
sustainable, and respectful arrangements, precisely what twenty-­plus years of
neoliberal policies have made quite difficult. It would be impossible to try to
characterize the seventeen thousand experiences of Living Community Cul-
ture that this network claims exist in Argentina (La Posta Regional 2012). Brief
mention of two experiences shows that these networks not only promote local
cultures but seek to pressure governments to legislate policies similar to those
urged by the Points of Culture program.
There is a transnational Living Community Culture movement operating
across several Latin American countries. One network within this movement
is the Pueblo Hace Cultura (the People Make Culture), which has been press-
ing the Argentine congress to pass a law that will designate 0.1 percent of the
national budget to a national fund of support for independent, self-­managed
community culture (Krakowiak 2009). These alternative organizations serve
the purpose of propagating the myriad cultural expressions of very diverse
groups and at the same time serve as a platform to intervene in public policy
and make it more democratic. Another Argentine experience is that of the
Union of Independent Musicians, which encompasses musicians of all styles
and genres and seeks to protect their livelihood and access to spaces and op-
portunities for rights, production, distribution, and live musical performance.
The union also intervened in public policy by presenting a new law to the
Argentine Congress that would create the National Institute of Music as the
principal promotion agency, provide infrastructure for production, guarantee
representation of independent musicians’ organizations from different cultural
regions in rights agencies that distribute revenues, create stable circuits of live
music performance in each cultural region of the country, create initiatives
for improving the dissemination of national music in the media, and create
a social cultural circuit to bring musical art to sectors that have little or no
access to this kind of art (Unión de Músicos Independientes de Argentina n.d.).
In these and other similar networks, in which some of the groups men-
tioned in García Canclini et al. (2012) are involved, the passion for art and

tr ansl ator’s introduction  xxix

culture is not limited to production, circulation, and reception but extends
to the creation of new entrepreneurial models and interventions into policy
to facilitate their work. Some of these networks collaborate with or are fellow
travelers of indignants movements. Some of these coincide with indignants
movements — such as the the Occupy-­like #YoSoy132 movement in Mexico.
The controversial Circuito Fora do Eixo (Outside the Axis Circuit), which
started a network of independent music festivals throughout Brazil and now
seeks to do the same with cinema, video, theater, and even social protests,
characterizes itself as a Brazilian kin of Occupy, although it now hobnobs with
corporate and political elites as it seeks to gain power.11 These and other net-
works that could be mentioned all seek to change the postindustrial-­politics-­
cum-­market complex (Yúdice 2013b). Moreover they have come to realize that
establishing transnational relations and markets is part of crucial strategies
for seeking sustainability in the current stage of globalization. They do not
find these strategies to be in conflict with local needs; on the contrary, they
strengthen the reach of the local.
García Canclini’s work is consistent with the goals of these networks. In-
deed many of the youth who form part of them have read his work and been
inspired by it. They constitute the “decentered multifocality” that he writes
about, and as such they are creating another globalization. Although it marks
a relative departure from Imagined Globalization, the new book on youth cul-
tural networks is both an outgrowth of certain questions that García Canclini
sought to answer over a decade ago and a testament to his ability to grasp the
imminent through an interdisciplinary methodology, grounded in empirical
research yet attentive to what art and philosophy adumbrate.

11. Fora do Eixo has found a controversial solution to the pressures of globalization: it finds its
sustainability by simulating horizontal, distributed networking, at the same time absorbing those
with whom it comes into contact. As such, it follows a capitalist logic: to continually expand. It
is increasingly criticized for taking advantage of the bands and artists who enter their network,
not only because they often are not paid but also because it uses their cultural capital to its own
advantage. Many venues will no longer work with them, alleging that they ride roughshod over
them, putting their logo on events produced locally, thus acting like a holding company that
assumes control. As they grow, they establish close relations with politicians and organizations
that benefit politically from the visibility and large number of members in the network that they
can deliver. They have sought to portray themselves as a Brazilian Occupy movement, albeit one
with strong connections to corporations and political interests. See Argüelles 2012; Garland 2012.

xxx  tr ansl ator’s introduction

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tr ansl ator’s introduction  xxxiii

introduction:
culture and politics in the
imaginaries of globalization

Sometimes we come across eloquent stories from writers whom we would

rather not cite. A few months ago I read this story by Philippe Sollers: “Two
plus two equals six, says the tyrant. Two plus two equals five, says the moder-
ate tyrant. The heroic individual who remembers, with all its risks and dan-
gers, that two plus two equals four, is told by the police: You don’t really want
to return to the times when two plus two equaled four.”
You wouldn’t want to return to the times of the dictatorships and the guer-
rillas, say the politicians. Nor would you want to return to the years of hyper-
inflation, warn the economists. At the same time, we wonder how much clout
can be gained by the countries seeking regional integration in order to protect
themselves from globalization in the new world disorder: the United States
with Europe against Japan and China, the United States with Latin America
so that the Europeans do not appropriate the Latin American market. In the
meantime we Latin Americans have established free trade agreements among
ourselves, peering warily outside the region to attract North American, Euro-
pean, and sometimes Asian capital.
The United States has been pushing, with the support of some Latin Amer-
ican governments, the signing of the Free Trade Area of the Americas (ftaa)
by 2005. The fifteen countries that compose the European Union have been
meeting with the countries of the Southern Common Market (Mercosur) and
Mexico, and as of June 1999 with the rest of Latin American countries, to study
the possibility of reaching a free trade agreement with some of them before
2005, possibly as early as 2001. This, despite the resistance of the French, who
see Latin American competition in agriculture as a threat. The United States
periodically accuses Mexico and European countries of dumping or protec-
tionism. In the Mercosur countries, disagreements and suspicions threaten
treaties each year. What’s at stake: Free trade, integration? New forms of sub-
ordination or resistance, or regional alliances? Can citizens consider alterna-
tives to prevailing arrangements and decide what would work better, without
taking into account intercultural ties? Old histories of rivalries and prejudiced
viewpoints burden these conversations about a future that is more imagined
than actually possible.
It isn’t easy to bring these agreements down to earth with statistics because
accounting practices are faulty. In the past twenty years the external debt of
Latin American countries has quadrupled or even sextupled. What can na-
tions like Argentina and Mexico do with debts of $120 or $160 billion if just
paying the interest each year requires half or more of the gdp? 1 U.S. foreign
debt (three times larger) is also unpayable.2 Who can understand at the level

1. Argentina defaulted in December 2001, after the imf refused to extend further loans due to
difficulty in paying burgeoning debt resulting from the adoption of excessive neoliberal policies,
including an untenable convertibility between the peso and the dollar, prescribed by that very
same imf. The government had frozen bank accounts and appropriated pension funds in a desper-
ate attempt to make debt payments without devaluating its currency, but riots brought down the
government, and in the next two weeks Argentina went through five presidents. Three years later,
Larry Rohter wrote in the New York Times, “Doomsday predictions abounded. Unless it adopted
orthodox economic policies and quickly cut a deal with its foreign creditors, hyperinflation would
surely follow, the peso would become worthless, investment and foreign reserves would vanish and
any prospect of growth would be strangled. . . . Instead, the economy has grown by 8 percent for
two consecutive years, exports have zoomed, the currency is stable, investors are gradually return-
ing and unemployment has eased from record highs — all without a debt settlement or the standard
measures required by the International Monetary Fund for its approval.” Larry Rohter, “Argenti-
na’s Economic Rally Defies Forecasts,” New York Times, December 26, 2004, accessed December
21, 2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/26/international/americas/26argent.html. [Trans.]
2. U.S. debt was substantially more, about $5.8 trillion, at the end of 1999 (Treasury Direct
2011b). As of December 22, 2011, it was $15.124 trillion (Treasury Direct 2011a). [Trans.]

xxxvi  introduction
of everyday life the numbers that one reads in the newspaper? To think about
politics requires imagination, although the statistics are so disproportionate
and the conflicts they provoke so barely manageable that they often paralyze
our imaginaries.
It is curious that this dispute of all against all, in which factories go bank-
rupt, jobs disappear, and mass migration and interethnic and regional con-
flicts increase would be called globalization. It’s curious that businesspeople
and politicians would interpret globalization as the convergence of humanity
toward a future of solidarity, while many critics read this painful transforma-
tion as a process that will homogenize us all.

Circular and Tangential Globalizations

Despite these dubious results, a uniform planetary market is celebrated as the
only way of thinking, and those who insinuate that the world can move in an-
other direction are disqualified as nostalgic for nationalism. If someone even
more daring questions not only the benefits of globalization but the premise
that the only means to attain it is trade liberalization, he or she will be accused
of wistfully yearning for an era before the toppling of an unbearable wall.
Since no sensible person believes a return to those times is possible, it is con-
cluded that capitalism is the only possible model for human interaction and
that globalization is its inevitable and superior result.
This book seeks to find out what those of us who work on culture can do
in the face of this future, which is promising for some and stifling for others.
That is, what questions does interculturality pose regarding the market and
globalization’s frontiers? At stake now is rethinking how to make art, culture,
and communication. If from the purview of culture we examine the shifting
relations between Europe, the United States, and Latin America, we may be
able to act differently from those who see globalization as an exclusively eco-
nomic exchange.
The first point that must be clarified is that culture is not only that place in
which one knows that two plus two equals four. Culture is also an indetermi-
nate vantage point from which one imagines what to do with statistics whose
significance is not very clear, whose cumulative and expressive potential has
yet to be discovered. One cultural sector produces knowledge that makes it
possible to affirm, in no uncertain terms and against political and ecclesi-
astic powers, that two plus two equals four: knowledge has made it possi-
ble to understand “the real” with a certain objectivity, to develop globalized
communication technologies, to measure the culture industries’ consumption

culture and politics  xxxvii

and to design media programs that increase mass knowledge and create social
consensus. Since the onset of modernity, another part of culture has devel-
oped through dissatisfaction with the disorder, and sometimes the order, of the
world; in addition to knowing and planning, this tendency seeks to transform
and innovate.
To come to terms with these two ways of understanding culture, which pit
scientists and technologists on one side and humanists and artistic creators on
the other, is a different venture in times of globalization.3 To know what one
can understand and manage and what it makes sense to modify and create,
scientists and artists have to deal not only with patrons, politicians, or insti-
tutions but also with a pervasive power that hides behind the name of global-
ization. It is said that globalization functions through institutional structures,
organizations of every scale, and markets with material and symbolic goods
ever more difficult to identify and control than when economies, communi-
cations, and the arts operated solely within national horizons. Nowadays it is
hard for David to find Goliath.
To understand this complexity, those of us who study creativity, circulation,
and cultural consumption increasingly dedicate ourselves to understanding
hard data, the “objective” socioeconomic processes that govern scientific and
artistic markets, as well as our unstable everyday lives. Nevertheless, given
that globalization is an evasive and unmanageable process, its managers also
account for it with narratives and metaphors. Hence, from a socioanthropolog-
ical perspective on culture, it is essential to work with statistics and conceptual
texts, as well as the stories and images that attempt to name globalization’s de-
signs. Moreover the turmoil experienced in migration, ineffective borders, and
travel evinces the fractures and segregations of globalization. This is also why
stories by migrants and exiles are replete with such narratives and metaphors.
A similar uncertainty destabilizes other social actors who are not usually
interested in culture. After the euphoria over globalization in the 1980s, pol-
iticians (who do not realize how their role is restructured when national bu-
reaucracies control ever fewer spaces in the economy and society) now ask
themselves what they can do and where. Businesspeople, disconcerted by the
brusque shift from a productive to a speculative economy, formulate similar
questions. Both invoke the need to create a new culture of work, consumption,
investment, publicity, and administration of information and communications
3. García Canclini is referring to social scientists and not natural scientists. The Spanish cien-
cia, like the German Wissenschaft, has a wider meaning than science in English and includes the
social sciences and sometimes even the humanities. [Trans.]

xxxviii  introduction
media. Hearing them, one gets the impression that they call upon culture as
an emergency resource, as if “to create a new culture” could magically give
order to what escapes from the economy in terms of work and investment,
compensate for what competition cannot achieve in the domain of the media
or consumption.
The call to construct a culture out of these globalizing processes can also be
understood as a way of establishing order among conflicting imaginaries. How
we imagine globalization varies: for the ceos of transnational corporations,
globalization principally encompasses the countries where their businesses op-
erate, the activities they engage in, and competition with other companies; for
Latin American rulers who focus on trade with the United States, globalization
is almost synonymous with Americanization; in the discourse of Mercosur, the
word also includes European nations and sometimes is identified with novel
interactions between Southern Cone countries. For a Mexican or Colombian
family with various members working in the United States, globalization al-
ludes to the narrow connections to what occurs in that part of the country
where their family members live, which differs from what Mexican or Colom-
bian artists, such as Salma Hayek or Carlos Vives, imagine as they encounter
an audience spread throughout the U.S. market.
In reality only a fraction of politicians, financiers, and academics think
about the entire world, about a circular globalization, and they are not the
majority in their professional fields. The rest imagine tangential globalizations.
The amplitude or narrowness of global imaginaries reveals the inequalities of
access to what is usually called global economics and culture. In this inequi-
table competition between imaginaries one perceives that globalization both
is and is not what it promises. Many globalizers operate throughout the world
feigning globalization.
Nevertheless even the poor or marginalized cannot disregard the global.
When Latin American migrants arrive in northern Mexico or the southern
United States they discover that the factory that hires them is Korean or Jap-
anese. Moreover many of those who left their country arrived at that extreme
decision because “globalization” shut down jobs in Peru, Colombia, and Cen-
tral America, or because its effects — combined with local dramas — made the
society in which they always lived too insecure.
An American filmmaker who works in Hollywood, that “symbolic home of
the American dream,” no longer has the same idea about his country’s position
in the world since learning that Universal Studios was purchased by Japanese
capital. After so many years of thinking that the West was modern and the

culture and politics  xxxix

East traditional, the Japanese advance on the United States and other Western
regions forced him to ask, with David Morley, if now “the world will be read
from right to left, and not from left to right” (Morley and Chen 1996: 328).4
The emphasis we place on migratory processes and the populations exposed
to these changes suggests how we might understand the movement of capital,
goods, and communications as well as the confrontation between different
lifestyles and representations. Having to think on a global scale produces ver-
tigo and uncertainty that lead us to entrench ourselves in regional alliances
and to delimit — in markets, societies, and their imaginaries — territories and
circuits that are a digestible form of globalization. There is much debate about
erecting new barriers that give order to investments, ethnicities, regions, and
groups that either mix too rapidly or remain threateningly excluded. Can the
processes of supranational integration achieve anything in this regard? Al-
though these questions have only just been broached in the European Union,
and more recently among the members of the North American Free Trade
Agreement (nafta) and Mercosur, the connections between globalization, re-
gional integrations, and diverse cultures is becoming a key issue, as much in
academic agendas as in business.5
As an introduction to this type of analysis, in chapter 1 I address three prob-
lems discussed in recent years when trying to understand where globaliza-
tion is leading us. The first is that sometimes globalization is summarized as
the opposition between the global and the local, which in my view is better
characterized as the diverse levels of abstraction and concretion into which
the economy, politics, and culture reorganize themselves within a global-
ized epoch. The second question, tied to the previous, is whether it is pos-
sible to reverse the political impotence we feel when the main decisions are
made in inaccessible, even difficult-­to-­identify places. Third, I explore the
theoretical-­methodological consequences of these difficulties for transdisci-

4. If Japanese capital in the 1980s acquired U.S. media companies, Chinese capital is now seek-
ing to acquire Internet enterprises (Russell Flannery, “Get Ready for More Chinese Tech Acquisi-
tions in the U.S.,” Forbes, August 25, 2010, accessed December 26, 2010, http://www.forbes.com
/sites/russellflannery/2010/08/25/get-­ready-­for-­more-­chinese-­tech-­acquisitions-­in-­the-­u-­s/print/).
Internet companies may be more important since most culture is already being circulated or dis-
tributed through convergence of tv, telephony, and Internet. [Trans.]
5. The rise of Chávez and his sponsored Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America,
the Brazilian and Argentine rejection of the U.S.-­sponsored continental trade agreements, and
even bilateral ones, and the Brazilian-­sponsored Union of South American Nations have rendered
U.S. trade strategies a serious blow. The newest regional integration scheme, the Community of
Latin American and Caribbean Nations, excludes the United States and Canada as well as British
and French dependencies. [Trans.]

xl  introduction
plinary research, which boils down to the challenges of working with a cul-
ture’s economic and political data and at the same time with the narratives and
metaphors with which it imagines globalization.
In chapter 2 I analyze the consequences of globalization as an “unidenti-
fied cultural object.” Distinguishing between international, transnational, and
global can make things clearer. Even so, globalization is not a clearly delimited
object of study, nor is it a scientific, economic, political, or cultural paradigm
that can be postulated as a singular model of development. We should accept
that there exist multiple narratives about what it means to globalize, but since
its central characteristic is to intensify interconnections between societies, we
cannot accept the variety of stories without considering their compatibility
within a relatively universalizable body of knowledge. This entails a discus-
sion of sociological and anthropological theories, and also that we concern
ourselves with the narratives and metaphors being constructed to incorporate
what generally remains within the cracks and insufficiencies of theories or
policies. Narratives and images reveal globalization’s utopian aspects as well
as what cannot be integrated, for example the differences between Anglos and
Latinos, or the upheavals experienced by people who migrate or travel, who do
not live where they were born, and communicate with others whom they do
not know when they will see again. The metaphors serve to imagine difference
and the ritualized narrations give order to it.
Then chapters 3 and 4 attempt to characterize a possible globalization in
the West by means of interactions between Europe, Latin America, and the
United States. I try to see how older and more recent migrations shape the
ways we view ourselves. The narratives formed in commercial and symbolic
exchanges from the fifteenth century to the middle of the twentieth seem
to be reproduced in the stereotypes of the most recent globalized decades:
the North’s discrimination toward Latin Americans, or its alternating admi-
ration and distrust. Nevertheless the reading of these narratives can be more
complete if we move from interpreting the confrontation between identities
to examining the cultural processes that either connect or alienate us. Iden-
tities may seem incompatible, but business and media exchanges multiply. In
order to understand this gap between ideologies and practices, I analyze how
the politics of citizenship employs imaginaries of similarity and difference in
Europe, the United States, and three Latin American countries: Argentina,
Brazil, and Mexico. For each case, I outline critiques of these models’ contra-
dictions, the difficulty in reconciling them, and, at the same time, the need
to achieve agreements in a time in which globalization draws distant nations
ever closer. I reflect on how to construct a transnational public sphere where

culture and politics  xli

the cultural concepts, and the consequent policies, are not incommensurable.
I consider four models: the European republican system of universal rights,
the multicultural separatism of the United States, multiethnic integrations
under the nation-­state in Latin American countries, and — cutting across all of
them — multicultural integration fostered by the mass media.
In chapter 5 I propose an intermediate and semifictional narrative. Just as
characters and syntheses are constructed in life stories, here I try to imagine
the misadventures of a Latin American anthropologist, a European sociologist,
and a U.S. cultural studies scholar. Given that one can no longer problematize
the relationship between theories and their social conditions of production
by referring only to the nation, class, or university in which they are elabo-
rated, I incorporate the daily life of researchers who travel and have access to
transnational experiences and delocalized flows of information. This account
is constructed with biographical data, both my own and those of others, but
that is of little importance because the discussion about the social sciences and
cultural studies that runs throughout these pages is concerned not so much
with what is true or false as with giving a credible version of the dilemmas in
which research finds itself today.
The different ways of globalizing, or transitioning from European to U.S.
hegemony, are evaluated in chapter 6 by comparing what happens in the arts
and culture industries. The application of industrial formats and transnational
competitiveness criteria to the visual arts and literature is modifying their
production and valuation, even though most artworks continue to express
national traditions and to circulate only within their own countries. The pub-
lishing industry is organized by transnational publishers, who group their cat-
alogues and distribution into linguistic regions. Where globalization appears
to be most effective is in the audiovisual world; music, film, television, and
information technology are being reorganized by a handful of companies for
diffusion throughout the entire planet. The multimedia system that partially
integrates these four fields offers unprecedented possibilities for transnational
expansion, even in peripheral cultures. But it also creates, in the case of Latin
America, greater dependencies than those we had in the visual arts in rela-
tion to France and now the United States and those that exist with Spain in
the publishing world. In addition to differentiating between the challenges
of transnationalization or globalization in each cultural area, I explore the
tensions generated between homogenization and differences in the existing
asymmetric relations between countries and regions.
In chapter 7 I focus on cities, because that is where the global is imag-
ined. Above all, it is in the major cities where the local is articulated with the

xlii  introduction
national, as well as with globalizing movements. In analyzing the requisites
for being a global city and how cities of the “first” and “third” world are dif-
ferentiated, we must grasp the key problems of dualization and segregation
provoked by global processes. We also will see ambivalent opportunities for
urban renewal offered by integration into circuits of commerce and consump-
tion, transnational administration, and information. The result is cultural
cosmopolitanism in consumption with a concomitant loss of employment,
heightened insecurity, and environmental degradation.
In chapter 8 I propose a polemical agenda of what cultural policies in global-
ized times might look like. Some of the challenges analyzed are how to recon-
struct public space, promote a supranational citizenship, communicate com-
modities and messages to audiences disseminated throughout many countries,
and rethink the potentiality of national cultures and regional and global insti-
tutions. I discuss why aesthetic questions today are of central interest to politics
and how this concern can be addressed in a market cultural economy.

First Questions of Method

There are several difficult problems to resolve in selecting narratives and met-
aphors, interpreting them, and linking them to hard data. I pose these prob-
lems, when the opportunity arises, in various chapters. I want to deal here
with one basic problem. Why choose the facts, stories, and symbols that appear
in this book about migrants and interculturality, about the relations between
Europe, Latin America, and the United States, when so many others exist?
The number of pages in this volume shows that my task is not to write an
encyclopedia of stories and metaphors compiled about such topics. The rules
for selecting those that do appear are as follows:

1. I chose, after various years of reading ethnographic studies and

chronicles and dozens of interviews with intercultural informants
from various countries, a repertoire that seemed representative of
the existing universe. I strove to cover emblematic structures and
transformations more than the diversity of situations.
2. I was interested, above all, in the events, narratives, and metaphors
that condense central aspects of international relations and the diverse
ways of imagining globalization — or its equivalent forms on a lesser
scale: international or regional confrontations and agreements — 
and that challenge the usual ways of understanding them.
3. I presented this selection and part of the interpretations that will

culture and politics  xliii

 be read here at conferences in the United States and Latin America
(Buenos Aires, Mexico City, São Paulo) and in international meet-
ings of Latin American Studies in Europe (Halle, 1998) and Canada
(Vancouver, 1997) and at the Latin American Studies Association
(Chicago, 1998). These ideas were also aired at cultural studies con-
ferences in the United States (Pittsburgh, 1998) and in anthropology
conventions in the United States (1996), Mercosur (1997), and Colom-
bia (1997) and at a symposium about the borders between various re-
gions (Buenos Aires, 1999). In these meetings I collected accounts of
other studies that challenged my selection and also received critiques
of my interpretations. Some reworked fragments from these confer-
ences are incorporated in this book. It would no doubt be possible
to multiply the debates; the selection and the interpretations can be
fine-­tuned, refuted, and contrasted in more settings, and alternatives
can be proposed. It should be obvious that the examples in these
pages represent a provisional closure with the aim of producing an
argumentative — not encyclopedic —“totalization” to be published
and disseminated for further discussion. At any rate, an effort was
made to think of the whole, as this is a book and not a collection of
articles and papers.

given the numerous meetings at which I debated parts of this book,

the list of those who helped me to think and rethink what is written here is
too extensive to acknowledge. Abundant mentions will be found in the ref-
erences utilized throughout the text. I want to point out, without claiming
to be exhaustive, conversations with Hugo Achugar, Arturo Arias, Lourdes
Arizpe, Lluis Bonet, Heloisa Buarque de Holanda, Román de la Campa, Edu-
ard Delgado, Aníbal Ford, Juan Flores, Jean Franco, Alejandro Grimson, Fred-
ric Jameson, Sandra Lorenzano, Mario Margulis, Jesús Martín Barbero, Mary
Pratt, Nelly Richard, Renato Rosaldo, Beatriz Sarlo, Amalia Signorelli, Saúl
Sosnoski, and George Yúdice.
The conditions for research and teaching provided to me by the Autono-
mous Metropolitan University of Mexico (uam), especially the Department of
Anthropology, and conversations with colleagues in the Urban Culture Studies
Program, whose names and joint publications appear below, contributed to the
preparation of this book. The economic support of uam during my sabbatical
year 1996–97, together with the aid granted by the U.S.-­Mexico Fund for Cul-
ture, facilitated field research and interviews in these two countries during

xliv  introduction
that period. Dialogues with Rainer Enrique Hamel, Eduardo Nivón, Ana Rosas
Mantecón, Tomás Ybarra Frausto, José Manuel Valenzuela, and Pablo Vila
were significant to my advancement in border, multinational, and political cul-
ture issues. My references to the art experiences of inSITE on the Mexico-U.S.
border, which allowed me to elaborate a good part of what I propose about
global imaginaries, I owe in part to conversations with Carmen Cuenca and
Michel Krichman, coordinators of that program. André Dorcé and Luz María
Vargas very ably supported the publication of this book.
In subsequent sections I analyze other justifications for this selection of
events, narratives, and metaphors, and I add more personal and institutional
acknowledgments. It will also be seen that it is not a secondary detail that I
have lived in Mexico during the past twenty-­three years as a more or less “Mex-
icanized” foreigner who does not stop being Argentine and has “compatriots”
born in Mexico and in other countries whose proximity requires removing the
quotation marks from that word.
It would be contradictory to the thesis and methodology of this book to
fail to recognize this heterogeneity or to attempt to speak only from one of
these places. For that reason I elaborate at times on what I suppose Tzvetan
Todorov’s (1996: 23) expression “this encounter of cultures within oneself”
means. If it is complicated to situate oneself within the interaction between
diverse symbolic heritages, it would be even more arduous to try to study these
themes from a single national or ethnic point of observation. “What makes me
myself rather than anyone else,” writes Amin Maalouf (2000: 1) at the begin-
ning of his book In the Name of Identity: Violence and the Need to Belong, “is the
very fact that I am poised between two countries, two or three languages and
several cultural traditions.” Like him and others who share this intercultural
position, I have asked myself, “But what do you really feel, deep down inside?”
(2). The Lebanese French author says that for a long time that question made
him smile. Now he considers it dangerous because of the assumption that each
person or group has a “profound truth,” an essence, determined by birth or by
religious conversion, and that one could “affirm this identity” as if compatriots
were more important than fellow citizens (who can be from various countries),
as if biological determination and childhood loyalties prevailed over the con-
victions, preferences, and tastes that one learns in different cultures.
“Border people,” says Maalouf, can feel like minorities and often are mar-
ginalized. But in a globalized world we are all minorities, including English
speakers, at least when they accept the many components of their own iden-
tity, and we try to understand each other without reductionisms, although
some are more minority than others. In short, it is a question of thinking about

culture and politics  xlv

the paradoxes of being simultaneously Arab and Christian, Argenmexican or
Mexiconorthamerican, Brasiguayo (the 500,000 Brazilians who live in Para-
guay), or Franco-­German. It is also a question of the differences between these
fusions-­fissures. They cannot be fixed by saying that two plus two equals this
or that, nor by a tyrant’s decision nor by individual heroism. These intercul-
tural tensions today are also the most fecund objects of research and an oppor-
tunity to construct collective subjects and open, democratic policies.

Mexico City, September 1999

xlvi  introduction